The Supreme Court's Monday decision may have given President Donald Trump new firing power, but it could also have far-reaching implications for the modern administrative state.
In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that Trump could lawfully remove Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, effectively overturning much of the nearly 90-year-old Humphrey's Executor precedent that had protected independent agency officials from at-will dismissal.
While the majority opinion held that the FTC's leaders must remain accountable to the president because the agency exercises executive power, a concurring opinion written by Justice Gorsuch raised broader constitutional questions.
Gorsuch argued that the ruling could lead to a broader challenge to the administrative state, questioning whether Congress can continue allowing executive agencies to exercise sweeping legislative and judicial powers.
The administrative state is a sprawling network of federal agencies that many conservatives have long dubbed the "deep state." For decades, independent agencies such as the FTC, Securities and Exchange Commission, and National Labor Relations Board have combined multiple governmental functions under one roof.
With Humphrey's Executor now overruled, those agencies remain intact, but their leadership is subject to presidential control if they exercise executive power.
Gorsuch questioned whether Congress can continue delegating broad legislative and judicial authority to agencies that are now unmistakably under presidential supervision.
"The power to write new regulatory crimes still exists," Gorsuch wrote. "The ability to judge disputes in-house remains, but now the house is white."
Constitutional law experts say that Gorsuch's concurrence points toward the next phase of litigation.
"I think the next step in this type of litigation won't be looking at firings per se, but really trying to make sure all of these administrative agencies actually fall into one of our constitutional buckets," said a constitutional law expert.
The expert noted that while Monday's ruling restored presidential control over executive agencies, it did not resolve whether those same agencies can continue exercising quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial powers that Congress has delegated over decades.
"There still remains to be more work going back and taking out of these agencies that now are properly under executive control the activities that really aren't fundamentally executive in nature," the expert said.
Another expert described Gorsuch's opinion as a roadmap for future legal challenges, arguing that the concurrence raises the possibility that Congress may ultimately have to reclaim powers it has delegated to agencies or assign certain responsibilities back to Article III courts.
